This Life as I Know It
by detective-sweetheart
Summary: What she wants is to go home, but what she wants and what she gets are two different things, and it's funny how she thought she was so grown up until this happened, because she doesn't anymore.


**A/N: And a chance to poke at Kathleen. SVU's not mine, and it hints at the season finale if you look. **

* * *

Her life as she knew it ended on a Tuesday.

The funny thing about this is that she'd somehow known that it was coming. Nothing ever stays hidden for long, she thinks, while she sits. Sooner or later, it all comes out. And once it does, there isn't really anything that one can do about it. She finds herself suddenly wanting something to numb whatever it is that she's feeling, and she knows what that something is, because it's the same thing that got her here in the first place. She's starting to think she has a problem.

And maybe she does. Before now, she'd never been caught, but she wishes she had been.

It might have kept this from happening. The holding cell where she's being kept isn't exactly a place she thought she'd ever find herself. But she's been in one before, at another precinct in Manhattan, which is where she is now, because that's where she was first charged with a DUI anyway. Then, it had been different. Then, she had been seventeen, two months from eighteen, scared out of her mind because she didn't think she'd been drunk, but apparently she had been. And you have to be twenty-one to drink in the first place, so add that on top of what she'd been nailed for and there was a hell of a lot of trouble.

Things like this always come back to bite later on.

She learned that once, when she was a kid. When her friends were talking about 'losing it' to some guy, and she'd rolled her eyes at them and told them they were stupid for it. And when she'd found out that her friend Ashley, who would be 22 now, got pregnant because of it. She wonders where Ashley is now, and what's become of her, wonders if she managed to straighten up her life or if she's still going down the same path as before. Wonders if she'll manage to straighten out her own life, or if things will only continue to be shot to hell from here.

It's not something that Kathleen wants to think about, but she doesn't have a choice.

Not thinking is what got her into this in the first place. She sits on the lower bunk, with her knees tucked to her chest, because whether or not she wants to admit it, this place scares the hell out of her. She wonders when she started falling so far that she got to this point and decides that she doesn't want to think about that either, because she knows when it was. Knows that it was when her mother decided to walk, and when she didn't think she could handle it anymore, because there was that thing with that stupid guy she'd been going out with, the one she broke up with, and then there was her parents' situation. It had seemed like a way to escape.

But the thing about that is that one person's escape is another person's trouble.

Being arrested in the middle of the night is nothing like being arrested in the middle of the day, by cops who know your dad, and don't say anything because they can't. It's nothing like being handcuffed by cops in a place where you know you're not going to run into anyone you know, because being arrested in the neighborhood meant that everyone was watching, and everyone was talking, and it wasn't as if people weren't saying that their family wasn't falling apart anyway, and what a shame it was. Kathleen bites back the sudden desire to snort at this. The stupid thing about their neighborhood is that everyone knows everything about every person because most of the parents have known each other since their own days at Glen Oaks High School. And the kids are all friends, until one of them screws up and suddenly, the other families are all worried about the same thing happening to their own kids.

You lot should see your kids when they think no one's watching, Kathleen thinks, dryly.

That's the problem with the world nowadays, though, she muses. No one's ever watching. If someone had been, she wouldn't be here. And she doesn't really blame her parents for the mess she's in, because she knows it's her own damn fault, and no one else could have gotten her here but herself, and her own stupidity. Her own issues. What she wants is to be out of this place, to be home again, where she doesn't have to deal with people walking by and staring at her, because somehow, they all know she's a cop's kid, and she knows they're probably wondering what got her here in the first place. But what she wants and what she knows is coming are two different things.

They will arraign her in the morning, and she can't help but wish it would go away again.

But it won't. And she knows it. It's gone away once, and because of some trial, it's all coming back again, and she should have figured that it would, because it always did. What she wants is to go home, but it is yet to be seen whether or not this will happen.

Funny how you think you're so grown up until something bad happens.

She blinks and when she can see again, there's someone watching her. This time, she doesn't look away, even though she wants to.

It takes a moment for her to realize she isn't the only one close to tears.


End file.
